Minimum Viable SEO: If You Only Have a Few Minutes Each Week... Do This! - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Even if you know — deep down in your heart of hearts — how important SEO is, it's hard to prioritize when you have less than 3 hours a month to devote to it. But there's still a way to include the bare minimum, even if you run on a tight schedule. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers a minimum viable SEO strategy to give those with limited time a plan going forward.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, Minimum Viable SEO. So if you only have a few minutes in a month, in a week to do some SEO, and I know many of you are professional SEOs, but you work with lots of folks, like content creators, clients, web developers, who have very, very limited time, what I want to try and do is provide a path for you of "do this if you have no other time in the week to do your SEO."

So let's say here's my calendar. It's February, so 28 days. Start of the month, you have an hour to give me, sometime in the first week of the month. It doesn't have to be, but that's a great way to go. At the start of each week, I'm going to ask for 10 minutes just to do a little bit of planning, and then each time you publish content, a very, very small amount of time, just 3 minutes.

I know it sounds hard to believe, but you can get a fair amount of solid SEO work. Especially if you're in an industry that is not hyper-competitive or if you're going after the right kinds of keywords, that aren't super competitive, you can really make a difference. If you're building up a lot of content over months and years, just following this simple protocol can really take your SEO to the next level.

Start of the month: 1 hour

So, all right, let's say we're at the start of our month. We have our hour. I want you to do one of two things, and this is going to be based on if you're technical SEO, meaning if your website is using WordPress and it's pretty much nicely crawlable, maybe you've signed up for Google Search Console, you don't see a lot of errors, there's not a lot of issues, you haven't created a bunch of technical data on your website in the past, great, fine, then you're going to be focused on keywords and content. A keyword to content map, which is something we've discussed here on Whiteboard Friday — I'd urge you to check that video out if you haven't yet — but I'm going to make an MVP version, a very, very small version that can help a little bit.

Keyword → content map MVP

Create a spreadsheet with valuable keywords...

That spreadsheet, I just want a spreadsheet with a few things in it, three things really. The most valuable keywords, so just the most valuable keywords that you know you're targeting or that you care about right now for your business. You think that people are searching for these keywords. Maybe you've done a little bit of keyword research. It could be for free, through Google's AdWords tool, or you could pay for something like Keyword Explorer for Moz, but, really, just 50 to 100 keywords in there.

...current rank and SERP features...

I want the current rank and whatever SERP features appear. You could even trim this down to just your current ranking and the top search SERP feature, so if it has a featured snippet, or if it has videos, or if it shows maps or news, whatever that is, tweets.

...and the URL targeting it (or a note to create content).

Then I want the URL that's targeting it. Or if you have no URL targeting it yet, you haven't yet created a piece of content that targets this keyword, put a little, "Okay, that's a 'needs to be created.' I need this before I can start targeting this keyword and trying to rank for it."

You're going to update this weekly. You can do that totally manually. Fifty keywords, you can look them up in an hour. You can check the rankings. You can see where you're going. That's fine. It's a little bit of a pain in the butt, but it can totally be done. Or you could use a tool, Moz Pro, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Searchmetrics. There are all sorts of tools out there that'll track rankings and show you which features appear and whether your URLs are in there or not.

Okay, this is our keyword to content map. If you have that hour, but you know you have technical issues on the site, I'm going to urge you, before you focus on keywords and content, to make sure your technical SEO, your crawl is set. That means, step one, just a basic, simple crawl analysis. So for free, you can use Google Search Console. It will show you, most of the time with relative accuracy, big important errors like 404s and 500s and things that Google thought we're duplicate content and that kind of stuff.

If you want to pay, you can get a little bit more advanced features and some better filters and sorting and more frequency and those kinds of things. Moz Pro is fine for that. Screaming Frog is good, OnPage.org. All of these are popular in the SEO field.

Crawl/technical SEO review

Step two, you don't need to worry about every single crawl issue. I just want you to worry about the most severe, most important ones with your one hour. Those are things like 404s and 500s, which can really cause a lot of problems, duplicate content, where you potentially need to use a rel=canonical or a 301 redirect, broken links, where you just go in and fix the broken link to something that's not broken, missing or bad titles, title elements that are particularly long or include misspellings or that just don't exist, bad, very bad to have a page on the web with no title, and thin content or no crawlable content. Those are really the worst of the bunch. There's a number more that you could take care of. But if you only have that limited time, take care of this. If you've already done this, then we can move on here.

Every time you publish a piece of content: 3 minutes

Finally, last thing, but not the least, every time you publish a piece of content, I'm going to ask for just three minutes of your time, and that is going to be around this minimum viable pre-publish checklist.

The minimum viable pre-publish checklist

So does the content have a keyword target? Yes, no, maybe? If it doesn't, you're going to need to go and refer over to your keyword content list and make sure that it does. So if you're publishing something, I'm assuming you're not publishing a tremendous amount of content, but a little bit. Make sure everyone has a keyword target. Make sure, if you can, that it's targeting two to three additional keywords, related keywords. So let's say I'm going after something like Faberge eggs. I probably also want to target Carl Faberge, or I want to target Faberge eggs museums, or I want to target Faberge eggs replicas, so these other terms and phrases that people are likely searching for that could have the same or similar keyword intent, that could live on the same page, that kind of thing.

Is that keyword in the title, the main one you're targeting? Do you have a compelling meta description? Is your content doing a good job of truly answering the searchers' queries? So if they've searched for this thing, are you serving up the content they need?

Then, have you used related topics? You can get those from places like the MozBar or MarketMuse or SEO Zone or Moz Pro. Related topics are essentially the words and phrases that you should also be using in addition to your keyword to indicate to the search engines, "Hey, this is really about this topic." We've seen some nice bumps from that.

You're doing this every time you publish content. It only takes three minutes.

Start of the week: 10 minutes

And the last thing, at the start of the week, I'm also asking you for these 10 minutes to do one or two actions. I just want you to plan one or two actions at the start of the week to bump your SEO. It could include some publication stuff. But let's assume you're just doing these three minutes every time you do that.

Take a few actions to boost your SEO

Link outreach and targeting keywords with content

At the start of the week, the last thing you're doing is just choosing one of these, maybe two. I don't need more. I want you to do something like link outreach. Reach out to a couple of high-potential targets. Maybe you use like a LinkedIn or SecTool to figure out people who are linking to two of your competitors. Or reach out to partners, to friends, do some content contributions, just a little thing to get one or two links. Or maybe create some content that's targeting a missed keyword. When you do that, of course, you go through your pre-publish checklist.

Upgrade ranking content

Maybe you are upgrading some content that's already ranking, like number 5 through 20. That's where there's a lot of opportunity for a high-value keyword to get bumped up. You could just do little things, like make sure that it's serving all of these items, try and get it a featured snippet, identify content that might be old, that needs a refresh, that's not serving the searcher intent as well because the information in there is old.

Contribute off-site content

Or you could try contributing some offsite content. That could be to places like YouTube, maybe you've seen videos show up for something, guest posts, a forum where you contribute, answers some questions on Quora, contribute something to LinkedIn or Medium, just something to get your brand, your content, and hopefully a link out there to a different audience than what's already coming to your site.

You do these things, right, you start the month with an hour. Every time you publish content, you put in 3 minutes, and at the start of the week, you put in 10 minutes to do a couple pieces of planning, this will take you a long way. Look, SEO professionals are going to do a lot more than this, for sure. But this can be a great start, a great way to get that SEO kicked off, to have a minimum viable SEO plan.

I look forward to your thoughts. And we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Great tips Rand! I just want to do an addition here with respect to creating/upgrading content. When people create/upgrade content, they focus on title, meta description, body, keywords, etc. which is good, but most of the times they forget about optimizing images part. Having well optimized images with proper 'alt' and 'title' tags can help in improved rankings and organic traffic. It's a quick fix, so can be a very useful part of the process.

Agreed. On competitive terms, a well formulated image alt des can get you well placed into Google image and drive back to you. Works only on things that are visually compelling, though. Had that on homebuilding, where people scroll pictures when looking for inspiration

Upgrading content ranking #5-20 - Rand didn't go into too much detail and I've had some great success for my clients by improving LSI density. Every week I'll gather LSI keywords for a target keyword using http://lsigraph.com/ and spend any spare time implementing these into stale blogs - I've noticed rankings starting to creep up significantly!

That, and structured data is easy and quick to implement once you know how! I improved a clients local search results in just under a month by adding schema.

One thing I would say is keyword mapping should be taking into account the format of the pages that are already ranking on page 1 for the keywords, as sometimes a dedicated page isn't necessarily going to help when RankBrain has decided a general topic page serves the users intent more effectively.

I run the sites I manage through sitebeam and / or screaming frog about once a month (no affiliation to any of both editors) to check for errors or declining performance. Anything "declining" is defintively worth checking. Other tools might do the same job, I guess.

Another thing : It might be petty and stupid, but for the sake of "change" and "freshness", don't hesitate to update and change things here and there on a lot of pages (if it is a smaller site) on a regular basis. Change text, pictures (and image alt), dates, content... Prune and update, like if it was a garden...

I feel alot of SEO specialists and business owners are in this position unfortunately, but this a great guide on actionable steps that you can knock out in just a few hours. Very helpful and having a written plan is a huge benefit!

I was interested to see whether Moz itself follow these tactics and does whiteboard friday have all the content with "targeted keyword" or not. Thus I did a quick research about whiteboard Friday content. It's really a time taking task to go through the content optimization, keywords targeting etc. Instead I simply pick some Hot topic content and researched their backlinks and keywords that ranked to find "targeted keyword"Result:

1. How to Prioritize Your Link Building Efforts & Opportunities - 3.28k Backlinks from 164 Ref Domain but no good keywords ranked in first page.

2. How to Kickstart an SEO Audit for Your Startup - 809 Backlinks from 94 Ref Domain and same.. No keywords in first page.

3. How to Craft a Remarkable SEO Strategy for 2017 - 1.16k Backlinks from 127 Ref Domain and One targeted keyword found "seo strategies" ranked in 10th position.

The research is done with ahrefs tool.

Note: There are also some great content that ranked really high with highly competitive keywords like. e.g. On-Page SEO in 2016: The 8 Principles for Success

It brings me 2 questions. Moz has a great authority and influence in SEO world. These posts also got a good number of backlinks. But why didn't rank with better keywords? What could be the reason? or are these content only meant for education and not getting traffic from Search Engine?

End of the day, I'm one of the biggest fan of Rand and Moz as well and love every tips you share.

Hey Rand! Thanks for sharing this compelling idea about content checklist and keyword searching. It really helps to narrow down the best possible ways for ranking high in SEO. I am fascinated by the idea of updating old content and sharing content on different websites. I think it is something most of the SEO`s ignore nowadays(including myself).

Great WBF! Extremely helpful for someone like me who has SEO as just one of the many things to do on my list. Thanks Rand! Actually would love to see a "live" Whiteboard Friday at MozCon - that would be cool!!!

While attempting to place ROI behind our SEO tasks, we find that technical SEO audits are uncovering quick fixes that really hold a site back. I love using Moz's tools for discovering what needs improvements. It fits to see you list content mapping first - but good to see your second item. Just way too many times we find that an incredible new post or article has some odd technical mistake or omission that holds back its potential.

Hello, Please can someone help me? I am a new member with email address: euopal4real@gmail.com. I downloaded the beginners guild to SEO. I want to kniow how to begin in learning SEO. I really want to learn SEO

Hi there euopal, thanks for the comment! The Beginner's Guide to SEO is a perfect place for you to start. Here are a couple of other resources I can share that should help get you started off on the right foot:

The Learn SEO portion of the site covers many aspects of SEO in more depth than you'll get from the Beginner's Guide alone. It's a great resource if you're curious about diving deep into specific topics.

The Basic SEO category of blog posts will list recent posts that are intended for beginner to intermediate audiences. It may be a little higher-level than the Beginner's Guide, so if you're finding things you're not ready for yet, you could either look them up in the Learn SEO section or save those posts for later.

The Q&A forum is a great place to search if you have a specific SEO question. Many common questions when you're starting out have been answered here before by the experts in the Moz community. :)

If you learn better in a classroom-type setting, we do have paid training available via video (or live and in person if you're in Seattle). However, the drawback here is that the classes do cost money, whereas most of the written educational content on our site is free.

I hope that helps a little bit! Good luck on your learning journey -- it's worth all the hard work you'll put in! :)

Nice video! Wondering how it would be possible to create content that is missing for a targeted keyword in ten minutes. You might be able to plan outsourcing the content creation in that amount of time. Even so trying to do content creation or even manage it on that tight a time schedule would tend to result in thin or low quality content.

Quite often I can check how, for a specific keyword, google modifies my target url. That is why it is interesting to spend a limited monthly time to check these movements. Know where to redirect your Google pages to modify or persevere in the positioning strategy.

thanks for the Great tips. Actualy i wasl upgrading my contents based upon the bounce rate to make content more useful for the visitors so they can stay longer on the content. For example i am putting infographic, vidoes and some times putting summary of the article at the end and it is realy helping me for the rank factors.

I HAVE A QUESTION RAND?. By using moz bar i am figuring out the Page authority of my all pages. and using the higher page authority articles to link the pages with low authority. Is it a good idea ?

A lot of your content is aimed at people performing/maintaining their own SEO. Can you do a post from the perspective of a marketing manager. Digital marketing is important, but not my only activity. I rely on suppliers to develop my website, so what should I look for to make sure they have done a good job or while creating the brief. I will work on the keyword strategy, but not directly in creating content, are there any tips for this.

Fantastic WBF! I already marked out time on my calendar to get started. I'm always hesitant to adjust content that is ranking well, so I'm curious if there are any pitfalls to avoid if trying to bump up content that is ranking in the #5-#20 zone - are there changes to that content I should avoid that might negatively affect ranking?

Excellent stuff! I particularly like the point to upgrade an old piece of content. Was particularly delighted that most of these pointers are included in my digital marketing planner especially the technical SEO elements that can often go unnoticed. Awesome stuff.

I like to do Keyword Research -> Technical -> Content -> Link Building. Link building is important, but is often the most difficult or time consuming. Make sure your site is is top shape, so it gives people more incentive to link to it.

Great WBF, Rand - I always love that you give examples and don't try to push a 'one size fits all' approach.

One of the best things about these checklists is that the simplicity of them means over time, you're more likely to do most of it 'automatically'. Despite always getting fab SEO results (even before I knew what it was!), having that 'aha' moment when it comes to optimising posts always makes life easier in the long run.

I'd also recommend giving some thought about /how/ you perform these tasks. Consider the pros and cons of 'monotasking' and 'batching'. That is, going completely through one post and optimising everything - or working on one element (for example, titles) for a set amount of time.

I mostly work on monotasking (one full post/page at a time), but that's just because my computer is painfully slow, and to hop across pages (even when I'm on a roll with creating a certain element effectively) can be a royal pain.

Great Post, I really liked your overview of the minimum things people need to do to get their sites to improve their ranking. I have a little more time to do SEO work, but not much. I use ahrefs and SEMRush for my research, but i'm glad you mentioned marketmuse and screaming frog. For some reason MOZ won't crawl my site. Its a new site only three months old but both Ahrefs and SEMRush can crawl it. I'm currently talking with MOZ's technical support to get the site crawled, hope they fix it soon.

One simple method I use for quick results is to find keywords that rank at 11-16ish and try to give them a nudge to the front page. Same thing for keywords just below rank 3. Reaching these plateaus can give you a big boost in visibility and traffic.